1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to electronic monitoring and real-time safety feedback and behavior modification, and more particularly to providing a method, auricle, and system for enhancing driver safety through body position monitoring with remote sensors, and furnishing feedback in response to vehicle motion, driver activities, and external driving conditions.
2. Description of the Related Art
Advancements in vehicle safety have progressed over the years, with new safety features and enhancements introduced with successive generations of vehicles. Safety features have evolved either by government mandate, or market driven demand. Early safety features included radial tires, padded dashboards, safety glass, and passive restraints (seat belts). The current generation of vehicles comes equipped with a myriad of safety features including front and side airbags, antilock brakes, vehicular steering assist, lane departure warning, collision avoidance systems, run flat tires, night vision systems, etc. The present day safety features rely on onboard vehicle equipped sensors and computers to monitor environmental, road, and vehicle conditions and parameters, as well as to provide feedback to the key vehicle safety and control systems. However, the feedback and control systems do little to monitor driver behavior.
Previous work with “lightweight” wearable computing technology for activity detection required the use of bulky hardware and physical modification of objects for recognition. Video processing, physiological monitoring devices, and other “heavyweight” sensors have had success in determining stress levels of a general user and broad context activities. Consumer level wearable computers, such as Personal Digital Assistants and upcoming cellular phones, can provide integrated accelerometer sensors for activity detection based on the kinematics of the human body as a whole. However, these consumer level wearable computers have limited utility in a vehicle environment, as the driver is in a seated position, and the accelerometer readings would not be able to distinguish driver from passenger activities unless mounted on an upper limb.
Recent efforts with ubiquitous and wearable sensors in the vehicular context have demonstrated the value of multi-sensory inputs to the driver to enhance situational awareness. Studies using vibro-tactile stimulators on the driver's torso have decreased the response time to critical events in simulations, and at least one car company has deployed a vibro-tactile warning system for unexpected lane departure. Additional research has created environmental and navigational control interfaces that significantly enhance the time drivers spend with their eyes and attention focused on the road, instead of the control interface. Vibro-tactile feedback mechanisms to both traffic-related and control-activation information have been shown to be highly beneficial in the vehicular context due to its low impact on the driver's analytical processes, while retaining the ability to be easily integrated into the driver's task workload. Vibro-tactile feedback can also be delivered privately compared to audio or graphical means. Work has been conducted with piezo-electric sensors and motors to provide haptic feedback on mobile computing/communication devices to facilitate vision free interaction. It has been found that users are able to distinguish between several “tactons”-tactile icons. However, these test to determine how many patterns a user is able to detect have been conducted under ideal conditions where the user is stationary and mainly focusing on haptic pattern detection, and not on a primary activity such as driving in a moving vehicle.